Who Runs Olympic Sports? It's Men

Congratulations field hockey, you’re the most progressive sport in
the whole Olympic program.

That needs some clarification: It’s not the sports themselves
under scrutiny here, but the sports’ governing bodies. The above
graphic describes the gender makeup of the executive committees—the
people in charge—of every sport in the Olympic program (London 2012
and Sochi 2014). That’s summer sports on top, winter on bottom; men
on the right, women to the left.

For example, starting at the bottom—we are in the midst of the
Sochi winter games, after all—the World Curling Federation has
seven men and one woman on its executive committee (you can
mouseover each horizontal bar for specifics).

Among all 33 bodies, field hockey’s executive committee comes
closest to equality by percentage, topping out at 37.5% female.
Holy heck, that’s pathetic. And even that fact comes with an
asterisk. The last official document from the International Olympic
Committee itself was a
2009 report in which the composition of the FIH executive board
was listed as 17 men and six women. Currently, the official FIH
website lists just the 16
members indicated by the above chart. That’s odd, because
bureaucracies tend not to shrink.

Reverting to the IOC numbers would give the “most equal” title
to skating, with four women holding one-third of the power. As an
arbitrary threshold—2:1 men to women—it should be an easily
achievable minimum. But it’s almost the opposite, with only two
governing bodies getting to that ratio. Oof. Collectively, it’s
embarrassing. That chart is bluer than Karl Rove’s worst
nightmare.

It’s even worse when you consider there is a credible argument
to be made that women generate a disproportionate amount of
horsepower in the economic engine that is the Olympics.

The single highest-rated night of programming from the 2012
London Olympics was Tuesday, July 31st, when NBC
posted a 21.8 rating. That was the night they aired the womens’
team all-around finals in gymnastics. The second highest rated
telecast from London happened two nights later, when the women’s
individual all-around finals took place. Even if it wasn’t the
most-watched night of the Olympics, it was still the largest
audience to watch Thursday night TV on any network
since the finale of “Friends” in 2004. Women also ruled online;
NBC’s most-streamed event was the women’s soccer final.

Similarly, it’s a safe bet that the highest rated night of NBC’s
coverage from Sochi will be one of the two nights of the ladies’
figure skating singles final. It was the highest-rated telecast in
Vancouver, and Torino, and Salt Lake City. The women’s competition
in Lillehammer is still the
sixth highest rated TV program ever, with a 48.5. But it’s not
every year you get hired goons whacking an ice princess on the
knee.

Heck, the IOC added a new made-up figure skating event this
year—the team competition—probably just to create more TV
programming.

It’s not only women athletes drawing viewers and it’s not only
women being drawn to watch, but you don’t have to look too far
beyond the commercials to infer that Y chromosomes aren’t being as
pandered to by sponsors during the Olympics as they are during most
sporting events. One commercial break over the opening weekend
went: Cover Girl, Ameritrade, Disney, AT&T; and there was an ad
for Secret—the exclusively female deodorant—in the previous break.
That doesn’t sound overwhelmingly feminine, but the AT&T
commercial was basically emotional porn for being a mom. As well,
GE and some paper towel made similar “Mom is Awesome” spots they
are running throughout the games. More obviously, though, it’s not
the beer-truck-truck-beer that usually dominates sports on TV. This
isn’t new; the Times
wrote about it back in Beijing.

And that is why NBC paid ridiculous money for the rights to the
Olympics:
$2B for the 2010 and 2012 games. The U.S. isn’t the only place
that watches the Olympics; we just pay the most for the privilege.
That $2B represents 51% of the total take for the IOC for that
cycle. The next two biggest spenders combined—Europe and Japan—paid
just over half of what NBC did.

So women are the biggest TV draws of the games, and they bring
in casual female viewers who otherwise mightn’t watch primetime TV,
much less sports. At least partially because of that, the most
lucrative market fills the IOC’s TV coffers more than half-full by
itself. Nice job, ladies.

But why are you so powerless off the ice or field or water or
whatever then? Twelve of the 33 bodies have one or fewer
women—that’d be zero for the mathematically challenged among you—on
their executive committee.

Forget equality—getting to 50-50. There are only a couple of
sports where the governing body is close to equity—here, mirroring
the participating rates among genders at the games. Those are
canoeing and boxing. The latter is partially because of a
technicality. Women’s boxing just appeared on the Olympic program
for the first time in London. The 36 female pugilists were dwarfed
in volume by the 250 men. But, percentage-wise, the 12.6% of 2012
female boxing competitors lets the AIBA’s 10% female board look
relatively equitable as a function of participation.

It’s probably a bad day in sports when the people running boxing
can be held up as an example for others to follow.

Most everyone else is pretty lousy. And not to pile on any one
federation, but FINA (the Fédération Internationale de Natation) is
a particularly egregious offender. Because of synchronized
swimming, there are actually more women than men under swimming’s
purview at the Olympics (676 to 624, or 52% women). Yet, FINA has
but one woman among 23 executive committee members. Mathematically,
tennis and handball are slightly worse, but that’s because they
have no female members at all (both are 50-50 in terms of
athletes).

FINA’s “Bureau” at Barcelona in 2013.
Photo by Giorgio Scala/Deepbluemedia.

Part of the problem is that these are independent organizations.
They aren’t necessarily beholden to the IOC, or to anybody but
themselves for that matter. For something like FIFA, soccer’s
governing body (and it just added the first female member in 2012),
the Olympics isn’t even the sport’s marquee event. It has much more
important business, specifically running its own quadrennial
graft-a-thon in the World Cup. Another part of the problem is that
these are global organizations and there are plenty of parts of the
world that still have Cro-Magnon views on gender roles.

That still leaves plenty to be explained. What the number of
women on any given governing body ought to be is a separate
argument. But if women are such an important part of the draw of
the games (and hence its financial success), then it seems
axiomatic that the numbers ought to be higher than what they
currently are. The IOC could theoretically put pressure on these
sports to put more women into positions of power. The games are
expensive to stage and the IOC has already made moves to curb the
number of competitors and limit costs. Baseball in 2008 was about
200 competitors for 3 medals. It’s one of the reasons it (and
softball) got the kibosh after Beijing. Rowing has seen its events
trimmed. Track and field has already been told its
numbers will be capped for 2016.

It’d be two birds should the IOC threaten to remove competitor
spots in sports if governing bodies don’t modernize their thinking
(and numbers) with regard to women. It would be a laudable first
step, and one that might actually be a catalyst for progress.

Of course the IOC might want to look inward first. With only
four women among its 14 executive committee members, even it
doesn’t reach that 2:1 threshold. And yet, apparently it could be
worse.